Rich Picture -- Barriers to Youth Connections

I just finished a one credit class in my woebegone MLS program. The final project for the class was to assess a situation, challenge or opportunity and analyze it from a "soft systems methodology" perspective.

Without offering too much detailed blahblah, the point was to take a systems -- or holistic-- look at your issue and attempt to map it out using a variety of different tools.

I LOVE these tools. Go check them out. Super good instruction -- and fun!

For your amusement, I'm posting one of the picture/maps I created. My focal point for thinking was on the issue of youth connection.

As we all know only too well, youth feeling/being connected -- to school, their family, caring adults -- is uber protective.  For this assignment I spent a lot of time thinking specifically about why youth are NOT connected to caring adults outside of their family.  As per the assignment, I interviewed a bunch of folks -- two coworkers (Kristin T. and Jenny O.), a college student (Jakki T.) and a parent of a young people (Dan J.)

This picture here doesn't reflect any specific interview -- rather it portrays what I got from the lot of them together.

In the version I submitted I was able to add little text bubbles via a PDF to give the image more content. Can't figure out how to do this here -- so bear with me.

You can see two distinct barriers that separate the young person from the community. The barrier closest to the young person is #1, the fence like barrier is #2.

Glynis' "Rich Picture" of barriers to youth connecting with caring adults

Barrier #1:
Young people have internal & external challenges that get in the way of finding and creating challenges:
I don't trust you.
You don't get me.
I don't know how.
I don't know what that is.

(Note:  I was uncomfortable putting this barrier here as I don't think young people are entirely responsible for it. That said, it came up STRONG in some of my interviews -- which made me feel like it should be addressed.


Barrier #2:
The systems and structures that we put in place to support young people actually create barriers to connection and isolate young people in a "teen world"

You can see that there are very few access points through which a young person might contact a caring adult. A little passage through their faith community or work in a local business.

The primary access they have is through their own family and schools. But are those really great access points?

Schools:  Schools are constructed and evaluated around a single set of measures: grades on standardized test and graduation rates. There role as "babysitter" is reinforced by families that need to have two working parents to make ends meet.

After school:  Afterschool activities are a rare place where connections with caring adults are valued AND where young people find opportunities to make connections with the community.

Family:  Families and community both believe in the primacy of the family which ultimately minimizes opportunities for young people to engage with other caring adults.

Finally -- and I didn't mean to do this as it didn't come up directly in any of my interviews -- media/digital technology is also part of this picture. I think it is an access point -- but not a fabulous one:

Media:  New digital media technologies present vast opportunities for access and relationships with community (and the world), but these are not optimized for development as they are unstructured and not supervised for quality and understanding.

So what do you think? 
What is missing from the picture?
Do you think these barriers are real?
Are there access points I missed?